


seconds

by haljake



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Attempted Murder, Human Hal, M/M, Successful murder, accidentally put feelings in this. yikes, backseat handjobs, hal has an existential crisis because of course he does, hitman jake, let's get unprofessional baby, listen..... just trust me, mentions of Dirk Strider so beware, self-indulgence always wins, sexual tension that takes fifteen thousand words to get resolved
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-23
Updated: 2019-08-23
Packaged: 2020-09-24 21:46:56
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 18,698
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20365594
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/haljake/pseuds/haljake
Summary: Jake attempts to kill the wrong Strider twin. Hal finds that fending off assassins is a lot sexier than college.





	1. Chapter 1

“I don’t think having children was a good idea.”

It’s a pretty weird sentence to hear in any context. Definitely not good. It’s a pretty bad sentence all around, really, and hearing it with your hands tied behind your back, a piece of fabric stuffed into your mouth, something dark pulled over your head, and no recollection of how you got into this situation definitely does not make it better.

Hal’s head doesn’t hurt, but the inside of it feels foggy and slow, like someone blew their vape smoke in through his ear and it just stayed there. His first instinct is to shake his head, will it to go away, but he resists the urge. Whoever was talking sounded close to him, so he stays perfectly still, and tries to take in what he can.

It’s dark, but his eyes are open. After some adjustment, he can make out the rough texture of fabric right in front of them, so someone put a black bag over his head. That’s no good. The more he swims into consciousness, the more his right shoulder aches, the one he’s lying on. Okay, right, he’s on his side, on a somewhat soft surface that keeps hopping and bumping now and then. Car backseat. So far so bad. What keeps cutting into his wrists feels like plastic, so he assumes it’s a zip tie. His fingertips feel numb, which he thinks comes more from lying on his arm for however long than from how tight the tie is. It is tight enough to not wiggle free, but it doesn’t feel like it’ll make his hands fall off.

The gag in his mouth is gross and damp. He’s pretty sure he should be able to get rid of that unseen, what with the bag over his head.

“I mean, I love children. I love them!”

Oh, right. The voice. It’s coming from up ahead, probably in the driver’s seat. Hal can appreciate not being stuffed into the trunk of this car, but of course up here he can’t do the old kick-the-taillight-out trick that John Mulaney has successfully popularized now. He can’t do much of anything here without this guy noticing, he figures. This guy and whoever is in the passenger seat.

“I love them dearly. I’m just… not very good at them. I’m not very good at most things, you know. I was really bad at this thing right here, when I first started! I daresay I am mostly successful these days, but I had to work hard to get here. It’s… you know. Things don’t come easily to me, but if I really try, I can usually make it work.”

What the fuck is this guy talking about? Hal is having more trouble than he would like getting rid of this gag. It’s lodged pretty tightly into his mouth, and it’s not like he can do any elaborate gagging and spitting without attracting attention. This driver dude might be right -- he isn’t bad at this.

“The problem is, children don’t give you that kind of time! There is very little room to fuck up with children, I believe. If it takes me ten years to figure out how to be a proper assassin then that’s alright. Then I will just keep trying. I had a lot of very messy kills back in my amateur days! Those were my problems to deal with, and I learned. But if it takes me ten years to figure out how to raise a child, then that’s also going to be that child’s problem! It’ll have issues and whatnot. Those stay with you forever. So I don’t think I’m cut out for this fatherhood thing.”

Yeah, he doesn’t sound like it. Does this guy already have children or not? Hal can’t fully remember what he was saying before. This conversation must have been going on for a while, and whoever the dude is talking to doesn’t seem like they’re going to be replying anything. There’s a pause that passes in complete silence, which translates to Hal as horrifically awkward. Not that he can focus on it much, after hearing the word  _ assassin _ in between all the daddy angst.

“And I think was right to take off. It hasn’t failed me so far as a tactic, if I’m being honest with you, pal. And I at least had the dignity to sign the divorce papers and all that junk before I pissed off. I really feel like that’s the best I could do for all of us.”

Alright, sure, whatever. Hal really wishes the topic could shift back to how and why this person is apparently killing people professionally. That would certainly come at least close to explaining why Hal is on the backseat of a car with his hands tied and a bag over his head. Did someone put a hit out on him? That doesn’t make any goddamn sense; barely anyone even knows he exists. The Strider family has its hands in some pretty dangerous businesses, yes, they’ve made powerful enemies, but that’s for Dirk to deal with. He’s the older twin and, with that, the heir to the metaphorical throne. Hal likes to stick his nose in his business, but he doesn’t officially  _ do _ anything. Who the hell would want him dead?

“It was she who wanted to get divorced anyway. So I should be right in assuming she doesn’t want to see me again, shouldn’t I? She won’t mind. I pay my alimony. I’m just not going to be around, and I’m going to assume she wants that.” When he sighs, he sounds like a dog after a long day. “Ah, I’m just guessing, Dirk. I’m always just guessing. I never get what people want from me.”

For one long, paralyzing moment, Hal is sure --  _ sure _ \-- that his own twin brother has hired an assassin to get rid of him. But when the blood unfreezes in his veins, Hal knows that things between them aren’t that bad. They butt heads sometimes, maybe a little worse than brothers should, but Dirk doesn’t want him dead. That’s not how they roll. And if he did, the asshole would probably just do it himself.

“It only works if they tell me what to do! That’s why this job is so nice. People tell me what they want me to do, I do it, and the moolah flies in. Done. It’s quite sad that life doesn’t work the way being a Craigslist hitman works.”

Yeah, he isn’t talking to Dirk. Dirk isn’t in the passenger seat. Hal is starting to think that nobody is in the passenger seat. Hal is starting to think that this dude, who presumably knocked him out, tied him up, and is now driving him to certain death, is talking to him.

“Married life did kind of work like that though. Not to play into that trope. I’m sure it’s different for other couples! I hope it is. But married life for me was just doing what she said. Even before that! She wanted me to propose, so I did. Did  _ I  _ want to propose? You know, Dirk, I’m not quite sure. I think I probably wanted to run away then and there. And maybe I should have. But she wanted me to be with her, and I…”

Another heavy dog sigh. Hal opens his mouth wide, chapped lips cracking and burning, and pushes his tongue against the gag. It falls out and lands directly in front of his face, held back by the bag over his head. Damp with his own spit, it presses wetly against his cheek now. This doesn’t feel much better.

“...And I don’t know how to say no to people. That’s just the thing. I never say no, and so people get me to do whatever they want. It’s my own fault, really.”

Jesus Fucking Christ. In general, as a person, Hal has trouble keeping his mouth shut and not telling people that they’re being fucking idiots, but it has never been as hard as it is right now, playing unconscious on the backseat of a car.

“Sometimes I do think people are taking advantage of me, but I sure as hell make it easy for them, don't I? I do. I don't like thinking about it, though. It's all easier if I don't!” He laughs, and it sounds as cheerful as it sounds fake. “That's why I only ever get introspective with someone unconscious on my backseat. You can't talk back, you're gagged! And it won't have any impact on anyone's future, because you'll be dead in an hour. See, Dirk, it's the perfect crime.”

This is impossible. Hal tries so hard, wills himself to keep quiet, to not compromise his already questionable safety back here. Him waking up obviously was not part of the plan, and this dumbass might just kill him an hour early if he realizes. Besides, if Hal actually focused on something other than his sob story, maybe he could figure out where exactly they are or where they're going. He should keep his mouth shut, he really should. But it is impossible. It's just not who he is. 

“My name isn't Dirk,” he says, voice scratchy from inactivity, “you sad sack of shit.”

It's immediately met with a loud, “Oh, golly.” The car swerves precariously, and for a second, Hal just accepts death. His leg extends to brace his foot against the floor of the car, to keep himself from just rolling off the seats. But whoever is behind the wheel steadies it quickly enough, albeit with a nervous laugh.

“Wow, you sure are neither unconscious nor gagged, are you, fella?”

“I woke up about twenty embarrassing personal revelations ago,” Hal says. His head feels nasty from being shaken around blindly like this, and he has trouble getting his leg back up on the seat.

“I remember gagging you,” the man says. His voice is changing, into something rougher, something practiced. Like a customer service voice, Hal thinks, but for killers. “What happened to your gag?”

“I ate it,” Hal says.

There is a beat of stunned silence.

“You did not,” says the man.

Hal says, “No, I spat it out.”

“Well, then. Um, what were you saying about your name?”

“It's not Dirk. You got the wrong Strider twin, idiot. Also, you got some  _ issues,  _ man.”

“Oh right, like I haven't heard that one before!”

“Which part?” Hal says and wiggles himself back into the backseat. His hands are tingling uncomfortably, but his bigger worry for now is whether or not this dude is going to shoot him in the head if he gives him too much lip.

“People love to invent twins when they have a gun down their throat,” he says. “Although I know you have one. That's convenient for you, buddy, but won't get you out of this.”

Hal sighs loudly against the wet piece of cloth in front of his mouth. “Look, man, pull over. Get this shit off my head and look me in the eyes. They're different from Dirk's. I'm sure whoever hired you gave you a detailed description of him, right? You'll see.”

“What, that you're identical twins with different eye colors? I'm pretty sure that's not how it works, buckaroo.”

“Can you cut that shit out and just call me Hal? I'm not about to explain our weird ass genetics to you. Your employer's gonna be pissed if you kill the wrong guy, won't they? Do yourself a favor, husband of the year.”

“How's about  _ you  _ do yourself a favor and shut your fucking pie hole,” he says, and Hal does, but he smiles into the soft blackness in front of him when he feels the car slow down and pull to the side. “Alright, smartypants. I will take one look, because I know you do have a twin named Hal. But after that you’re going back to Zonked Out Town. Mind you, even if you are someone else, it’s not like I can just let you walk now, is it?”

“I dunno, dude,” Hal says, wiggling again to try and get himself into an upright position without the use of his hands. It’s not as hard now, when the car is still and his head feels less foggy. “I don’t know your name and I haven’t seen your face yet. You could just take this nice sack here and put it over your own head instead. Cut some holes in it with the knife you undoubtedly have, get a good look at my beautiful eyes, and I’d be none the wiser. You could just throw me out at the nearest gas station. Call me an Uber if you’re feeling frisky.”

“What I am going to do,” the guy says, while Hal is listening to the click of his seat belt unbuckling and the shuffle of his clothes, “is get the duct tape from the glove compartment so we can get that gag to work again.”

Hal sits up, and the gag falls out of the thing that’s pulled over his head, to land wetly in his lap. The glove compartment opens and closes, then the driver’s side door does the same. Then the door to Hal’s left. He’s coming back here. Hal feels his whole body tingle, right down to his almost numb fingertips. He shifts on the backseat, to turn more to his left, then there’s a brief pull on his hair when the bag is pulled off his head.

He’s not sure what he expected. Hal has been so busy with figuring this whole situation out, wondering about this guy’s marital troubles, and wiggling around on the backseat of this car, he hasn’t really put a mental image of the man in his head. He didn’t sound significantly older or younger than him, that was all he could really tell from back here.

He  _ certainly _ didn’t think he was going to look like this.

The last time he saw an assassin this pretty, he was playing Assassin’s Creed. The light is bad in here, the whole car only illuminated by the small overhead light over the dashboard, but Hal knows a hot guy when he sees one. Even in here, his eyes look piercingly green, he’s got dark, thick locks falling into them, and when his mouth hangs open in concentration, it shows a pair of buckteeth, one chipped at the edge, which is weirdly charming? He’s got a scar over his lips, where the tooth chipped.  _ Just like Ezio. _

Remembering what’s going on, Hal recalibrates his focus just in time to see the pair of eyes in front of him narrow a little. It’s probably hard to tell in the dim light, he realizes. His eye color could be anything between amber and black. This probably won’t work out.

“I don’t know,” Ezio 2.0 says. His nose is a little crooked, like it was broken before, right where the bridge of a pair of glasses would be. Just like the teeth, it’s weirdly charming. “I can’t really tell--”

And in that exact moment, Hal’s instincts kick in, and he headbutts the man square in the face.

The guy yells as his head flies back. Hal catches a glimpse of blood shooting from his nose, but doesn’t leave himself time to really take it in. He has to get moving; his feet scramble over the floor in an effort to push himself backwards, ass scooting over the seat until his bound hands bump into the right-hand door behind him.  _ “Fucking Criminy,” _ Ezio snarls, one hand over his face, the other one reaching for him, while Hal prays that this car doesn’t have child safety locks.

A hand closes around his pants leg. His fingers find the handle, and push open the door, and Hal tumbles out backwards. There’s a jerk going through him when his leg is held back, so Hal instinctively kicks out. He hits something, there’s another frustrated groan, his leg is free. He’s on his ass in the mud, on what looks like a highway shoulder in almost complete darkness, and he doesn’t have a second to waste.

Getting to his feet without his hands and barely knowing where he’s going is supremely awkward, but it only takes him one failed attempt. A lifetime of athletic training and the rush of adrenaline are all he needs to steady himself, and take off.

He has no idea where to -- he can't see any promising headlights or buildings close by, but he figures at some point he'll have to run into something. All he has to do until then is outrun the killer, and he's good on his feet. He's fast. He can do this.

Just as he figures he should probably take off towards the bushes next to the street, just in case the man decides to go back to his car and follow him with that, he hears footsteps approaching from behind. They're as heavy as they are quick, like he's wearing boots he could kick Hal's skull in with if he wanted to.

Hal swears under his breath, tries to take a sharp left to throw him off, and is instead thrown to the ground with the full force of a grown man half a foot taller than him.

All the air rushes out of his lungs with a dry wheeze, and when he tries to pull it back in, he inhales a mouthful of dirt instead. The knee pressing down on the small of his back doesn’t help, and his attempt to cough ends in a strangled, pained noise. “You’re just full of bad ideas, aren’t you,” the voice says above him. The pressure on his back gets worse for one second, then disappears, and Hal takes a loud, uncomfortable breath.

His mouth tastes like dirt and he spits some out, retches, spits some more--when he figures it might have been enough to pull the attention towards his mouth, he jerks his foot back as far as he can, hoping he might be able to kick the guy in the back. It doesn’t work, of course. His foot hits nothing, and what happens instead is a hand fisting firmly in his hair, pulling his head up, and next thing he knows something cold presses against his temple.

Hal has never had a gun pointed at his skull before, but he figures that must be what it is. As far as feelings go, Hal thinks, this is profoundly unsettling. Sure as fuck gets him to keep still for now.

“You are very lucky I haven’t put a bullet in you yet,” says Ezio, and Hal hates how level his voice is, like this is nothing. Like he could do this all day, but then again, he really is a professional hitman, apparently.

“Yeah,” Hal says, sounding the very opposite of that, “why haven’t you? Our therapy session not over yet? I charge by the hour, my guy.”

The safety clicks off. Hal closes his mouth.

“Up,” he says. His weight disappears off of Hal’s back, but the hand stays in his hair. Hal has to contort and squirm in the dirt to even get his feet under him again, which takes several seconds and strained grunts, and this grip on him doesn’t make it easier, but maybe that’s the point. Once he’s halfway on his feet, he gets pulled up by the hair the rest of the way and winces, but tries not to make any noise. At least he gave the guy a nosebleed, he thinks. That seems relatively fair, compared to how his entire front is damp with mud now and his tongue still tastes like dirt.

“All right, pal.” The hand disappears from his hair, but grabs him by the back of his neck instead, like a cat at the vet. “I’m gonna walk you back to the car, and you’re going to pipe down for me.”

“I’m still not Dirk--” Hal starts saying, then the gun that was just pressing up against his temple appears in his peripheral vision again.

“And I still have this baby here. Keep it to yourself, and I’ll keep it out of your mouth.”

“Okay,” Hal says quietly. He swallows, and it tastes like when Dirk made him eat flower soil for a dare. “Homoerotic.”

There is a brief flounder in the steps he takes next to him, like he almost tripped over his own feet for a split second. Simultaneously, the grip on his nape tightens, and Hal shuts up again, but he still counts it as a win.

A single car drives by while they walk back towards where they came from in silence. Hal looks after the red of the taillights in the dark and wonders who was in there, where they were going, and what they thought they were seeing on the side of the road. They would have been too fast, and it would have been too dark, of course, to notice the zip ties around Hal’s wrists. They’re just two guys walking down the highway, arm in arm.

It’s alright.

He’ll figure out a way to survive this.

Fear is coiled cold and hard in the very pit of his stomach when they reach the car, but Hal forces himself to keep ignoring it. He hasn’t died so far. That’s gotta count for something.

This time, he’s pushed into the passenger seat, with no explanation. As the guy leans over him to buckle him in, Hal’s hands press uncomfortably against the backrest, and he barely notices because he’s checking out how broad the chest right in front of his face is. How gay, Hal wonders, is too gay? He decides it’s not very important. His kidnapper has a dark red smudge on his face from where he must have wiped at the nosebleed, and it’s an immensely satisfying sight.

They drive off again in silence, with an air around them like when you pissed off your parents, only your parents have a gun in their belt. Now that Hal is freed from the bag over his head at least, he busies himself with looking around, and realizes that this car looks kind of like a dumpster. The cup holders look sticky, and there’s a total of three empty Subway bags on the dashboard. Down in the leg room seems to be where the real party happened, because Hal’s sneakers almost disappear between grease stained takeaway boxes and plastic cups. He almost says  _ Dude, get a tumbler _ out loud, but remembers the feel of the gun barrel against his temple, so he decides against it with a heavy heart.

When he finds a Starbucks cup, he closes his feet around it, and starts using them to turn it. Tongue caught between his teeth, he squints down into the half darkness there, trying to make out what the sharpie on it says. It starts with a J, definitely. Four letters. Jack? Actually, it looks more like Joke.

“Jake?” Hal says. Next to him, Ezio The Second flinches like he punched him in the guts. Hal turns to look at him, delighted, and gets a thoroughly unsettled look in return. His green eyes keep nervously darting back and forth between him and the road, and Hal waits for him to make the connection between the plastic cups and the name, but he doesn’t seem to get it. He pretty much just looks like Hal guessed a name out of absolutely nowhere.

“Is that your name?” Hal continues. He doesn’t get an answer, just another profoundly disconcerted glance before Jake focuses back on the road with a deep frown on his face. Jackpot.

“Where we going?” he tries next.

“I don’t like leaving messes in other people’s homes,” Jake says. For a moment, Hal wants to be surprised at the readiness with which he gives that away, then he remembers how much he already knows about this dude’s personal life. “So we’re going somewhere secluded, where I can clean up after you in peace.”

Okay. That was kind of harsh. Hal shifts in his seat. “Like a cabin in the woods?” he says. “Pretty cliché.”

“It’s scenic,” Jake says. The discussion is over with that. Hal still feels like bringing up that he’s sending the wrong guy off the scenic route here, but he also still hasn’t forgotten the gun, and it’s not like he can convince Jake while they’re driving. He’ll have to try a different approach, and it’ll have to wait until they’re there. But at least that gives him time to plan for it. Anything to keep the cold knot in his stomach at bay.

The road stays mostly empty save for two other cars driving by them in rapid succession, so Jake definitely has the secluded part down. The dashboard tells Hal that it’s closing in on three in the morning, and he briefly tries to remember what he was doing before all this happened. It makes his head feel that nasty kind of foggy again though, so he leaves it be and refocuses on flexing his hands every now and then to make sure they’ll stay awake. He’ll need them.

Hal does his best memorizing every highway sign he sees, for his way back, and as soon as Jake leaves the highway and drives them down increasingly muddy roads, he tries to remember the turns, too. It is starting to look pretty horror movie-esque, but Hal thinks he could make it work in his favor. It’s not like this Jake guy has night vision. If he plays this night-in-the-woods scenario right, he should be able to get away from him just fine.

The cabin looks like it might actually be cozy if it was daytime, or if you weren’t bound by the wrists and could still taste some mud on your tongue. The light inside the car clicks on when Jake opens his door, and when he comes around to pull Hal out of the passenger seat by the arm, it illuminates the dried, caked blood on his nose. A bunch of it got caught in his beard. Hal looks away to watch his own steps instead, makes sure he doesn’t trip on the gravelly way from the parking space to the door.

“So, what’s the protocol?” he asks, as Jake pushes him into a living room and switches on a warm light. The place isn’t covered in plastic tarp, which he counts as a win. “You sit me down here somewhere and shoot me in the head?”

“Do you want to sit for it?” Jake says. When Hal turns around, he’s inspecting the magazine of his gun, then pushes it back in and looks at him. “You can keep standing up if that makes you feel better.”

“Damn,” Hal says. “That’s cold.” Then, he ducks down and kicks Jake in the shin with as much force as he can muster.

Ideally, that would have thrown him to the ground. As it is, he just flinches and says,  _ “Ow, what the fuck?” _ very loudly, but it gives Hal enough of an opening to move. Jake grabs for him, but Hal dodges his hand just barely, steps behind him so they’re back to back, and grabs the knife from Jake’s belt with his bound hands. It kept poking out between him and the car seat whenever he was switching gears. It’s been part of the plan for several miles.

With a cold, tingly sensation all over his body, Hal is now hyperaware of the presence of a loaded gun in this room, and in the hands of someone who knows what to do with it. He's aware of the speed of a bullet, but he's also aware of his own speed and the moment of surprise he's created. The couch he plans to duck behind is only a few feet away, and he crosses the distance in two seconds tops. By the time he's sliding and crouching behind the backrest, he has sawed through the ziptie with the knife, and pulls his hands to his front again.

His shoulders ache softly, and his wrists are an angry red. Hal chucks the cut tie underneath the couch and flexes his dominant left around the handle of the knife. So far, so good.

He's about to throw out a cool one-liner, when a shot rips through the air, his eardrums, and the couch. Hal flinches back, a curled up ball with a knife, and stares up towards the frayed hole in the fabric. It's way too far up to have hit him. Either Jake's aim is bad, or this was a warning shot.

“Do you own this place?” Hal says, voice raised just enough to carry through the room to him. “This couch specifically?”

“I do. Give me the knife,” Jake says. Hal wonders if this has ever happened to him before. He did say he was bad at this at first. Maybe it's been a while. “You know it's no use in a gunfight.”

“We'll see about that,” Hal says. He takes the blade between thumb, index and middle finger and tries to remind his muscle memory of the movement he's learned. It's a lot bigger and thus heavier than a throwing knife, but he'll make do. When he pops back up from behind the couch, Jake is walking towards him, gun lowered in his right. “Actually, you can have it back.”

The knife makes a sharp, whooshing sound for the split second it spends flying through the air. It’s replaced by a meaty rip when it cuts into Jakes arm, and a loud clatter when both it and the gun drop to the floor.

Jake doesn’t even flinch. Without a second of hesitation, as soon as Hal moves from behind the couch to make a break for the door, he launches himself at him.

Hal hits the floor with his entire body. The room rushes past him, then everything is black for a second when his head hits the hardwood, then all he sees is Jake’s broad form above him, pinning him down. Every single one of his muscles reacts immediately, tensing in another rush of adrenaline to pump all four limbs up and push against Jake. His knees hit something, his hands push against shoulders, Jake makes a muted noise, but Hal’s instinct to push him off doesn’t work out. It just shifts him on top of him, pushes him to the side a little, so Hal balls up a fist and punches him in the ribs from there.

“Motherfucker,” Jake says,  _ finally _ sounding strained. He puts his hands on the floor and pushes himself up, hovering just above Hal, and Hal starts moving immediately. Jake’s arms are long enough for him to just worm out from under him -- as soon as Jake realizes what’s happening, he reaches for him again, but Hal pulls his leg up to his chest, then kicks out to hit Jake’s other arm, effectively getting both of his hands off the floor. When Jake crashes back down and hits his chin on the hardwood, Hal can hear his teeth click shut.

Hal sits up, ass, hands and feet on the floor, and throws a quick look towards the door. He could make the dash if he was fast enough, even if Jake is between him and there. He could race around him, make a break for the door, maybe hijack the car if he can. Otherwise he’d have to make it through the woods on foot, in the dark. It’s not the best plan, and Jake is already starting to move again as he’s mulling it over.

Something else needs to be done. As soon as Jake starts pushing himself up on his hands once more, Hal darts forward and pushes his entire weight into sitting on his back. Again, Jake grabs for him, and again Hal is ready. He grabs both of his wrists and pulls them back far enough that he knows it’s got to at least sting.

If it worked on Dirk when they were ten, why shouldn’t it work on this guy?

“Great,” Jake says, teeth grit, and Hal almost laughs. He must be having a shit night. “Now what? You know you’ll be dead as soon as you let go, right? You can’t stay back there forever, you horse’s ass.”

“Sick burn,” Hal says. Jake doesn’t exactly have the daintiest wrists, but he still manages to transfer one so he can hold both of them with his stronger left hand. Jake tries to grasp the opportunity and struggles immediately, but it only makes the pull on his shoulders stronger. “I won’t stay long. I’ll just see what you’ve got in your Batman-esque utility belt back here and then piss off.”

It’s one of those with a bunch of leather pouches attached to and dangling off of it, like the guy is actually Indiana Jones, and not a hitman. The holsters for a gun and a knife Hal has already spotted, and he would be very surprised if he wouldn’t find anything useful in one of the two pouches he can reach at the back. He’s sure Jake came prepared. He really isn’t bad, after all -- Hal is just better.

His right isn’t quite as dextrous as his left hand, but he still manages to pop open one of the buttons behind himself blindly. “Thought so,” he says triumphantly, while Jake groans, and Hal pulls out a handful of zip ties.

“You know I’ll get out of these,” Jake says, while Hal takes a few seconds to figure out how to do this without letting go of his wrists. He’ll have to be quick, which is fine, because being quick is his whole thing. “I’ve trained for this.”

“Oh, I trust you will,” Hal says conversationally. It’s incredibly satisfying to watch himself do this, he thinks -- his own wrists are still bruised red from when he was tied up for who knows how long, and it is great to see his hands return the favor now. He makes sure to have the ties cut into Jake’s skin just a little bit when he pulls them shut tight. “But I bet you won’t make it before I can steal your car. Since I have you down like this now, maybe I’ll just find the key in one of your pants pockets, hm? Won’t even have to hotwire it then.”

Jake grunts something that sounds a lot like  _ evil little maggot, _ which Hal finds profoundly funny, and then starts writhing underneath him. Now that the hands won’t be a problem anymore, Hal dares to shift a little, and look behind him, where it’s looking, unfortunately, like Jake might be making some actual headway by pushing the balls of his feet against the floor. If he gets enough grip, he could probably throw Hal off and do some serious damage.

Hal sighs. “What, do I have to hogtie you?” he says, and grabs for more zip ties. “Do you really wanna do that to yourself, Jake? Imagine if someone comes in and finds you like--”

He can’t finish the sentence, because Jake manages what Hal didn’t manage earlier, which is bending his leg back far enough that he can kick Hal square in the face with his entire, boot-clad foot.

Hal’s whole world goes pitch black for an amount of time he can’t gauge. He’s back on the floor suddenly, his body numb and his face on fire, and he’s choking on the blood running into his mouth from his nose, and it feels like it might have been minutes. The room only slowly swims back into focus, but when it does, he can see Jake sit up and fumble around behind his back. So maybe it has only been a few seconds. Hal has no clue; his head is still swimming, and he wants to push himself up on his elbows at least, get a move on, but his body isn’t listening just yet. The only thing he can get himself to do is turn his head to the side, so he can cough blood on the floor instead of back into his windpipe.

When he finally gets one of his arms to listen and raises it to wipe blood off his face, Jake moves. To Hal’s still battered brain, he’s just a flurry of limbs, and then he’s on top of him again, and Hal’s hand didn’t even get to touch his face. It’s pinned to the floor now, with Jake holding him down one-handed, knees to either side of him, and a knife in his other hand. Hal squints. That’s… not even the knife he stole from him. That’s a different knife. He maybe should have figured that this guy would have several knives on him.

Jake is staring down at him, knife half raised, palm warm around Hal’s wrist, and Hal tries to will himself to do something. Anything. Feeling is slowly returning to his body, and his mind should be racing, but it’s slow. There’s still blood caked into Jake’s beard, on his upper lip. He’s worrying his lower one with his dumb big front teeth. Hal does his best to at least imagine punching them out of his mouth.

“Huh,” Jake says to him.

Hal says, “Huh?”

“Oh, you were right,” Jake says. From the corner of his eyes, Hal watches the knife lower slowly. “They are red.”

For a moment, Hal has no idea what the fuck he’s talking about. Then he realizes that Jake is looking at his eyes, so Hal stares right back up at his. Jake has a sort of calmly befuddled expression on his face, the look of someone who has erred, but not for the first time, and not for the last time.

“They’re not supposed to be red.”

“I’ve been telling you,” Hal says. His tongue hurts to move in his mouth and he wonders if he bit it when he got kicked. His whole face is still one solid plate of dull pain, so he’s not sure what broke where. “I’m not Dirk.”

“I guess you aren’t,” Jake says. Then he just sits down, on what happens to be Hal’s thighs, like he needs a moment. “Hal, then, yes? His brother’s name was Hal.”

“Yeah,” Hal says. “What now?”

He has to stall, he thinks, at least a little. Strength is returning to his body and mind, and one of his arms is still free, so if he just gets a few more seconds, he can try to punch that knife out of Jake's hand.

“Well, I can’t let you go,” Jake says. It’s the answer Hal expected, but something in his stomach still twists sickly. “You’ll just run and tell your brother about this before I can get to him. But…” He sighs, and Hal thinks again that he sounds like a tired dog. Hearing it from the backseat of his car feels like it happened weeks ago. “I have to say, I am not the hugest fan of snuffing someone out when I’m not supposed to. It’s not like anyone will pay me for this.”

“Dirk might,” Hal says. Jake looks at him in confusion, and he uses that moment to reach for the knife with his free hand.

Jake’s arm moves out of reach immediately. Hal tries to prepare himself, somehow, for the knife to come back down -- maybe he can slip out of the way just enough for it to miss whatever Jake is going for, heart, jugular, he has no idea -- but it doesn’t. Jake slips it into his belt instead, and Hal is so perplexed by it that Jake has no trouble grabbing his wrist and pinning that one to the floor, too.

“You’re pretty far from home,” Jake says. The part of Hal’s brain that’s been thirteen years old for about ten years now casually reminds him of the way he’s sitting on his legs and pinning him down right now, and Hal tries not to listen. “If I leave you here, I’ll get to your brother before you can warn him.”

“Bullshit,” Hal says immediately. “It’s not like I have to be physically home to contact him.”

“You don’t have your phone on you,” Jake says. “I made sure of that.”

“Other people have phones,” Hal says. “I’ll find someone. Can’t be that far to the nearest gas station.”

“You don’t have any money. Won’t get far in this world without money, chap.”

“I have bruised wrists and a face full of blood. People will let me use their phone. And if all else fails, I’ll just steal from someone.”

Something flickers over Jake’s face. Hal has seen it before, when he’s cocky with other people, when he pulls moves on someone he finds hot, when he runs his hand through his hair just so, times the moment of taking shades off just right. For one split second, it almost looks like Jake got turned on by the idea of Hal stealing money.

“I’ve made it this far through the night without any warning,” Hal continues. “There’s no way in hell you can still kill Dirk Strider.”

He watches Jake’s throat work around a gulp, and tries to accept his victory. Jake looks convinced, but he very much still has at least one knife, and is pushing Hal down against the floor pretty heavily by now. Hal can feel his own heartbeat in his fingertips thanks to the weight of Jake pressing down against his wrists, so he should probably leave it at this and not provoke him any further.

Hal has always been good at estimating when is well enough. Unfortunately, he’s never been good at leaving it alone.

“Wonder what your employer will have to say about that,” he says. He has no actual idea about what the professional life of a Craigslist hitman looks like, but that doesn’t sound too good. And sure enough, Jake's face twists right above him. Hal allows himself just the hint of a smile. “Can’t exactly go face them again like this, can you? Looks like you’re gonna have to run away again.”

“The more things you find to say to me,” Jake says, irritation obvious in his voice now, “the more I wonder how nobody else has shot at you before tonight.”

“Maybe someone has. You don’t know that,” Hal says. “Maybe I also hogtied them and stole their car.”

“Forget  _ also. _ You’re not doing any of that with me, son,” Jake says, and moves. And Hal has to hand it to him, he thinks as he’s manhandled through the air way faster than he can even react to: Jake is pretty good at this when he’s not distracted by his victim waking up and talking smack at him. Before Hal can even finish the thought, he’s on his stomach, hands pulled behind his back and once more bound at the wrists, one of Jake’s hands pushing against the side of his head with just enough pressure to keep him from wiggling up from the floor.

“Here’s what’s going down,” Jake says. “I will let you go, but I decide where. If you can get to your twin brother before I do, then so be it. I don’t need this gig, especially not after almost getting my sniffer broken by your thick noggin in my own car. We’ll have an even playing field. If Dirk lives by ten this morning, I’ll just take my leave and you’ll never see me again.”

“You think I won’t go to the cops,” Hal states. Jake scoffs down at him almost immediately.

“I don’t read living people very well, Hal,” he says. “But I know who likes alerting pigs and who doesn’t. You’re not ratting me out in this lifetime.”

Huh. Hal shrugs, which he finds out is a bad idea when your hands are tied behind your back and your whole body has been through a lot in a short amount of time. He keeps his wince to himself, though. “Fair enough,” he says.

“All right,” Jake says. “Up we go.”

This time, Hal doesn’t struggle when he’s being pulled up and steered towards the door again. He looks back into the room before they leave, his eyes darting from the other knife that’s still there on the floor, the gun only a couple feet away from it, the hole in the couch. It seems precarious of Jake to go out with only the one knife he put in his belt, but then again, Hal guesses he has no idea how many other weapons the man has on him. Or inside the car. He did say something about glove compartment duct tape earlier.

“Is there a gun in here?” Hal asks, aiming for casual while Jake maneuvers him back into the passenger seat and buckles him in. Just when Hal is about to get distracted by his chest again, he catches Jake’s irritable frown.

“What?” Jake says. “Of course there is.”

“Oh,” Hal says. As Jake walks around the front of the car to get to the drivers side, he eyes the glove compartment. Yeah, there’s no way he can get to that with his hands tied. He wishes he could have somehow gotten that knife back.

That’s the problem with knife throwing, he thinks. They’re not boomerangs.

The headlights illuminate the same way Hal tried so hard to memorize when they got here. He has no idea how long ago that was. The dashboard tells him a time, but he doesn’t remember what it was when they stopped. Once they pull out of the forest and back towards the highway, he realizes that the first signs of a sunrise are starting to light up the horizon.

It doesn’t feel like it’s been that long. It doesn’t feel like it’s time to go home again.

Hal shifts, as if that could help him get rid of that weird ass thought. And as if it could also help him get rid of this whole situation, Jake immediately casts him a glance, like he’s expecting him to pull another surprise knife from somewhere and take the wheel. The fact that he doesn’t seem to put it past him makes Hal feel a lot better about not actually being able to do it.

“This is really weird,” Hal says finally. “Awkwardly quiet, without you rambling about your personal problems to me.”

Jake doesn’t say anything, but Hal watches the back of his neck and the tips of his ears change colors.

“Do you always do that?” he presses on. This is more fun than thinking about why he doesn’t feel like going back home. “Talk to unconscious people on your backseat? You said it’s because they can’t talk back, right?”

“Yes,” Jake says stiffly.

Hal, a descendant from a long line of people who can’t deal with their own problems as well, says, “‘s a good strategy.”

“Do  _ you _ always do this?” Jake says. “Talk back so much that people want to strangle you.”

“Yes,” Hal says pleasantly. “It’s kind of my thing.”

“Stupendous,” Jake says. Hal thinks that sarcasm looks good on him, then thinks that that’s a really weird thing to think about someone who was going to kill you.

They fall silent again, and Hal tries to relax into the seat as much as he can. His hands are pushing against his spine and making it virtually impossible to just loosen up and slouch a little, but he does his best. He has no idea where Jake plans to drop him off, but the roads out here seem just as deserted as they were earlier, so it seems like it will be a while until they reach anywhere.

Hal does his best to not find that reassuring.

It’s just the adrenaline, he thinks, unmoving, crumpled against a car seat. He'll be happy to be home once he's actually there. Happy to end this night and never see Jake the Craigslist hitman and bad husband again. Happy to go back to his life. He just needs to get home, probably.

When he turns his head to look out the passenger side window, the face looking back at him is still battered and bruised, bloodied around the nose, dirty on one side. The mud from earlier has dried on the front of his clothes, making his shirt uncomfortably crisp. His nose is stuffy on one side, but once he focuses, he does realize he smells like dirt and blood and sweat. Home has a shower, clean clothes, a bed. Home has Dirk, who will surely ask him what the fuck he got himself into this time.

“You should still see your kids,” Hal says.

There’s a beat of silence, which Hal suspects is because Jake needs to make sure he doesn’t off-road the car. Then he says, “What?”

“You have kids, right?” Hal says. “I wasn’t sure if you have them or if you and your ex were just talking about having them, but I think you do. You should still get to see them, even if you’re divorced.”

“I just took you to a secluded place in the woods to put a bullet in your head,” Jake says, “and you take me for the man who should be in contact with his offspring?”

This time, Hal stays silent. The dark red of his eyes looks almost black in the window. He could come up with something to say, he thinks, given a little more time and a little less overthinking his own situation.

Jake says, “Is a bad father better than an absentee father?”

“No,” Hal says quietly.

“Then leave me be.”

_ “Are _ you a bad father?” Hal says. “Do you have evidence to back that claim? Or do you just assume you’d suck from the get go because you’re so insecure about everything except for killing people?”

“Ease up, Doctor Phil,” Jake says, and Hal snorts before he can stop himself. “Since you heard me say all this, you must have also heard me say that it takes me a long time to become good at things. Too long for parenting. It’s no use.  _ I’m _ no use. They are better off with their mother.”

“It sucks to have a shit father around, fine, but having one who you know cares about you and tries his best despite having flaws is better than not having one at all. Life is about trying, you dumb coward, life is about bettering yourself--”

One hand still on the wheel, eyes still on the road, Jake leans over and reaches for the glove compartment with his right. When it opens, the first thing Hal visually processes is the ABBA CD. But Jake gestures to something else.

“Glock or duct tape,” Jake says. “One of these things is going into your visage if you keep talking.”

“Depending on what?” Hal asks immediately.

“Were you born without a brain to mouth filter, or did you develop that somewhere along the way?”

“Legend has it I got out of the womb and immediately told my twin to get his life together.”

“Okay,” Jake says. “It depends on how much I want to shove my gun down your throat, obviously.”

Hal says, “Hmm,” and shifts in his seat just enough to pretend like that didn’t turn him on. Jake’s empty takeout boxes make vacant plastic noises when he moves. He should really start wanting to get out of here.

For the next few miles, both of them are quiet again. It  _ does _ feel weird, Hal thinks. He wants to keep bickering, he wants to hear more of whatever else Jake thinks about the world, and then tell him why it’s stupid. Whenever he looks over to him, Jake’s face seems to go through a myriad of emotions, simply because the street lights keep rolling over it and illuminating it from different angles. He should look tired, all things considered, but he doesn’t. Bored, Hal thinks, if anything.

When Jake takes an actual exit, Hal’s stomach starts dropping, and no matter how hard he tries to make it stop, it keeps going until they reach the outskirts of some town and the car slows to a halt at the curb.

“Do you know this place?” Jake asks, his voice ripping through the eerie silence of a switched off engine. Hal leans forward a bit to peer out of the windshield, squinting.

“Not this corner in particular,” he says. “I know the exit you took, but I have no clue which way home is the fastest from here, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“Fantastic,” Jake says. He leans over far enough to unbuckle Hal, and push open the passenger door. Hal watches his arm flex on the way. “Get out of the car, and then walk around the front to my side.”

The Starbucks cup makes another noise against a cardboard salad box when Hal gingerly moves one foot out the door, but he stops to blink at him. “Why?”

Jake rolls his eyes. “So I can cut you loose. I don’t want to do it while you’re still in here, knowing how close you are to the glove compartment gun.”

Hal has no idea how to use a gun, but he’s not about to say that. His feet feel heavy when he clambers out of the seat, pushes the door shut with his hips, and walks around to Jake’s side. When Jake rolls down the window, Hal turns his back to him, feeling a prickle in his neck knowing that Jake is about to pull out a knife.

The pressure around his wrists disappears, and he pulls them to his front again. They’re even redder than before, and Hal almost physically cringes at the thought that it’ll be nice to carry this reminder around for a few days. He rubs the thumb on his left over the wrist on his right, and shifts on his feet.

“What are you doing?” Jake says behind him. “Scram.”

Hal lifts one foot off the ground, tries to will himself to go forward, and instead turns around to face Jake through the window.

“Teach me,” his mouth says.

Several seconds pass, in which Jake just looks at him blankly. Then he says, “What?”

“Your job,” Hal says. “Teach me.”

With the hand still holding the knife, Jake rubs a knuckle under his bruised nose, which makes some of the blood flake off of his beard. “Pal,” he says, “I believe if you wanted to make it as a Craigslist hitman, you could do just fine on your own already.”

“I don’t know how to fire a gun,” Hal says.

“You threw a knife with such precision that I dropped mine. From behind a sofa. You’re fine, kid.”

It is strangely nice to hear, of course, but not exactly what Hal was hoping for. What, then,  _ was _ he hoping for? His teeth grind together, and he shifts again, and suddenly, Jake is mirroring his frown.

“You…” Jake says slowly. “You don’t want to go home, do you?”

Hal’s jaw sets. It’s true, but it’s stupid, and Jake has no business knowing what’s going on inside him anyway. He doesn’t say anything, and after both of them stare at each other in uncomfortable realization, Jake sighs deeply.

“I’m not taking you in,” he says. “You’d stab me in my slumber. If you don’t want to go home, don’t. Who’s stopping you? Not me. The world’s your oyster, and all that. Have a good life, Hal Strider.”

“Can I have your knife?” Hal blurts out.

Jake smiles at him, and reignites the engine. “No,” he says, and drives away.

Hal stares after him with the most offended expression he can muster, considering his whole body feels like it’s about to turn itself inside out. It’s been a long night, he tells himself. That must be it.

He straightens his back, and starts looking for the nearest house with lights on. It’s very early morning at this point, too early for many people to be awake. A gas station or 24-hour supermarket would probably be more convenient, but it’s just rows and rows of houses here.

The first person who opens their door turns down his request to use their phone, and Hal contemplates either assaulting them or stealing their car. He doesn’t do either. Several people afterwards don't open their doors at all, even though Hal can see their silhouettes move about inside. He's several blocks away from where Jake drops him off when someone agrees to let him inside, then hesitates and backtracks, saying they're really not comfortable with it. Hal tries to be understanding instead of showing them the marks on his wrists and asking what the fuck they think is going on here.

It pays off, too. They give him directions to a corner store instead that should still be open and able to help him, and a little over ten minutes later, Hal is dialing Dirk's number into a battered old Samsung.

“It’s four in the morning, you fucking troglodyte,” his beloved sibling says.

“Listen, Dirk, someone is coming to kill you,” Hal answers, and returns the store clerk’s mildly concerned glance with a wink. “They have until ten this morning, so just stay vigilant until then and you’ll be golden.”

“Damn, did you finally come through with that deep web hitman you promised me for my fourteenth birthday?”

Hal pauses. “Sort of?” he says. “I didn’t hire him, but other than that you’re correct.”

“Man, where the hell are you?” Dirk says. Hal can hear him shuffle about on the other end of the line. “I didn’t notice you leaving tonight. Is this call coming from inside the house?”

“No, he kidnapped me thinking I was you--”

“Classic.”

“Yeah. I’m about to call an Uber or something. I’ll be home in an hour.”

“Cool,” Dirk says. Hal can tell from his tone that he doesn’t believe him, but that’s alright. It’s in their blood to already be vigilant even without a warning like this, so if Jake does try anything, he’s pretty sure Dirk will be fine. “Hey, so, this guy that’s coming to kill me. Is he hot?”

Hal looks at the store clerk, a tired looking teen who has busied himself doodling stick figures on a post-it note since Hal is occupying his phone. His stomach does something weird again. “Yeah,” he says.

  
  


Dirk starts believing him once he sees him in person, once he stands in the bathroom doorway and watches Hal clean the blood off his face and strip out of his mud-caked shirt. He even gets him something to put on his wrists, while Hal more or less tells him what happened. Some parts he leaves out. Like the fact that he was on his way to a semi when Jake was pinning him down in a murder house in the woods. The whole scuffle doesn’t seem important for Dirk to know, in retrospect.

They go over their house security, seal their windows, grab their weapons. Dirk hasn’t slept yet, so he knocks back another coffee and faces the South wall. It’s not the first paranoid all-nighter either of them has pulled.

The sun rises. Hal’s face starts to ache slowly, like someone is pressing their hand against it and upping the pressure every other minute. He feels tired and wide awake at the same time. Every time he blinks, he sees the Ezio scar going over both of Jake’s lips and parting his beard.

Ten AM comes and goes.

Jake doesn’t show.


	2. Chapter 2

Hal tries to go to sleep that night and finds that he can’t. His body is heavy and achey, a dull sting in his bruises, and even though he ate and brushed his teeth, sometimes he feels like he can still taste the gag on his tongue. It’s normal, he thinks. It’s a trauma reaction. He’s not sure if he’s supposed to be missing it, though.

No, he doesn’t miss being shoved around and having to hide his fear of being shot by being a smartass. He misses the adrenaline. He misses being around someone who felt like a challenge.

When he gets back up in the darkness of the night to grab a drink, he doesn't manage to come back to bed. A therapist recommended that to him once, getting up and having a glass of water if he couldn't sleep after over an hour. He was supposed to go back afterwards, though.

He doesn't want to go back.

Hal thinks about the classes he takes at college, and the jobs he works on the side. Most of them are home office based, online security gigs he runs for people that are too stupid to do it themselves. As he stares out of the kitchen window of the apartment he and Dirk share, Hal can't remember a single one of his clients’ names. He barely remembers what his classmates look like, much less his professors. It all seems starkly irrelevant, and he wonders why he never had anything better to do.

The rest of the night he spends on his laptop, digging deep into the Craigslist marketplace for criminals. In the morning, he falls asleep hugging it in his bed, and misses all of his classes.

  
  


It takes him several days, but eventually, Hal finds the house in the woods again. It looks nice and cozy in the daylight. When he gets out of his car, the only tire marks are his own.

He tries both the doorbell and knocking, but nobody answers, so obviously his next course of action is picking the lock.

The door swings open, and nothing happens. No boobytraps, and no other form of attack. Hal didn’t exactly expect Jake to actually be here, since he had no reason to believe that he lives in this particular place, but some part of his mind had wanted him to be at least prepared for it.

Hal makes a small tour of the place, his stomach churning and churning the entire way through. There’s one bedroom, with a neatly made bed, and a closet with a handful of pieces of extremely generic clothing. Probably for Jake to change into if he gets in a mess on the job, he figures. There’s several things of canned food in the kitchen, and the fridge is off. The only thing inside is a single lime.

He stands around in the living room the longest. It’s clean, entirely. No scuff marks on the floor. He expected the weapons Jake dropped to be gone, of course, but he didn’t expect …  _ everything _ to be gone. There is a couch here, but it’s not the one Jake shot through. It didn’t just get fixed, Hal thinks, running his fingers over the flower-print fabric where the hole should be. It’s an entirely new couch, just looking exactly the same.

Like none of it ever happened.

  
  


Many people on Craigslist want someone killed, apparently. The more Hal looks at it, the less he feels up for it, but he finds other ads to entertain himself with. Someone pays him to figure out a way around a store’s security system, and Hal greatly enjoys the brief exhilaration of possibly being part of a heist. Someone else wants help with installing cameras in public bathrooms, so Hal sends them a virus.

A week after waking up tied up and gagged in the back of a car, Hal has missed almost all of his classes. To Dirk, he says it’s because he is too vain to show up there with his face all bruised up, and to be fair, that is partly true.

He just also cannot bring himself to care.

In his dreams, Jake holds him at gunpoint until Hal ducks in with a perfect move and shoulders him in the stomach. In his dreams, they make out on the floor afterwards.

He wakes up and still thinks about him. It’s that dumb habit of his, of Jake’s, that ridiculous habit of venting at his victims, assuming they’ll never live to tell the story. Or think about it relentlessly for days on end. Hal wonders what his ex wife is like, and if they’d get along. How old his kids are, what they’re called. He wonders if Jake is ever going to see them, or if nothing Hal said had any effect on him.

He wonders if Jake will go on through his life and keep letting other people do that to him. Make all his decisions until nobody is happy anymore, and then blame it on him. He wonders if Jake will ever learn to say no.

As Hal grew up, the second born in a set of twins, people loved to tell him that he couldn't, and would never be like Dirk. Not as important, popular, not as worth investing in. Then, when he used this excuse to just do whatever, be loud and dirty mouthed and irresponsible, they scolded him for not being more like Dirk. Whatever he did, it was always wrong. People insisted on telling him who to be, and he could never please them.

When he wakes up in the late evenings, in the darkness of his room, listening to his brother move through the rest of the apartment, Hal worries about the man who tried to kill him.

  
  


Almost two weeks after what Dirk has been referring to as The Incident, Hal is distracted from his nightly Minecraft session by a noise at his window. Instead of actually looking up from his computer, the first thing he does is check their own house security. He and Dirk updated it after The Incident, because Jake must have gone in and out with Hal somehow without anybody noticing, so that was no good. It’s not showing any sign of forced entry now either, and Hal figures it must be a bird outside.

When he looks up, the broad figure of a man is silhouetted in the dark outside, in the process of sliding something in underneath the window to pop it open.

Hal almost falls off his chair. His body tenses constructively instead, making him get up and rush to the other side of the room, grab his sword from under the bed and then crouch beside it. Hopefully, from here, he will be less visible but still have a sensible point of attack.

How the  _ fuck _ do people keep getting past their security? And who is  _ this  _ guy? He and Dirk had figured that someone else might grab the job Jake vacated, and come for Dirk, but goddamn it, Dirk’s room is  _ next door. _ Dirk isn’t even  _ home. _ He left to sleep over at a friend’s place hours ago, in clear daylight, and whoever keeps sending people to kill him must be fucking abysmal at describing him.

Hand wrapped tight around the handle of his sword, Hal listens to the window pop open. One heavy foot lands on the floor, then another one. Hal peeks past the bed frame, and sees someone straighten themself up, close the window again, and move their head to look around.

“So sorry to bother you,” Jake says. “But I saw you on your computer just now, so I know you’re here.”

The voice Hal would recognize anywhere. The awkward way to say things, too. Hal rolls his eyes and gets up again and, without facing him, walks towards the door frame so he can switch on the overhead light.

“Oh, that is better,” says Jake. “Hello again, Hal.”

When Hal turns to look at him, something in his stomach lurches. It’s a wild mixture of euphoria and dread, and it gets obvious quickly which will get the upper hand. Jake is dressed in all black and wearing a shoulder holster with two guns very much visible, but his entire stance is non-threatening. There’s no tension in his arms, no flex in his legs -- if anything, he seems like he’s trying to make himself smaller, his head pulled between his broad shoulders just a little. Like he really is sorry to bother him.

“What,” Hal still says, “you coming back for seconds?”

“For what?” Jake says, blinks, then understands. “Oh. Well, no, I-- I mean, maybe. If you look at it this way, I suppose.” When Hal just cocks a brow at him, Jake sighs and looks down at his hands. “You’ve, um… You’ve been on my mind.”

Hal says, “Have I.”

“You,” Jake says, “were trying very hard to come with me.”

Hal bristles. “I asked  _ once.” _

“Well, yes, but, then you asked for my knife, and you stood there longer than you should have after escaping someone like--uh, like me, and I got this impression that…” Again, he looks around, and a soft frown creeps on his features. “You sure did wind up going back home.”

“What did you think I was gonna do?” Hal says. “Infiltrate Craigstlist crime and come hunt you down for sweet revenge?”

“I have considered the possibility,” Jake says stiffly. “You seemed like the sort of fella that makes things happen, is all I mean. You almost escaped me twice! And almost broke my nose. If you didn’t want to go home, I thought… you wouldn’t.”

Shifting from one foot to the other, Hal can feel himself grimace. Of course he’s thought about it. Of course Jake is right, even. Normally, when Hal wants something, nothing can keep him from getting it -- minus himself. The only force in the world that can thwart Hal Strider, he thinks, is Hal Strider. 

Adding insult to injury, he’s not even sure what kept him here. It’s not like he has been doing anything worthwhile. Hal likes to think that he was maybe building up to something, scoping out the internet and skipping classes, but he’s not sure if that’s true. The real truth, maybe, is that even though Hal prides himself in making things happen, some of them are still scary. The truth is that leaving this apartment and making his life exciting enough that he would stop craving Jake’s rough hand in his hair and the sting of zip tie around his wrists sounds hard, and he wasn’t sure how to do it.

“So now I think,” Jake says, luckily, before Hal can voice any of that, “I regret letting you go.”

Hal cocks a brow at him. “Still kinda sounding like you're here to kill me, bro.”

“No--ugh,” Jake says and rolls his eyes, and it pulls a smile from Hal. This huge man in his cat burglar outfit and double guns, who has killed people, is exasperated with him. What, truly, is better than this? Jake runs both hands through his hair, and when he's looking at Hal again, he returns the smile, defeated. “But this is what I mean, sort of. You're quite honest, for someone dealing with me. And I'm both talking about my vocation and about the fact that I was telling you about some rather ugly life affairs there, in my car.”

“Everyone’s honest with a gun in their face,” Hal says. Jake’s smile brightens as he shakes his head.

“No, Hal, they aren’t. Everyone is  _ nice _ with a gun in their face. Everyone finds the nicest most charming things to say to me with a gun in their face.” Jake shrugs. He still looks so lost, standing in front of the window of Hal’s room, out of place. Hal is starting to feel it too. “I think we both agree that you were being neither nice nor charming, there.”

Once again when facing this man, Hal thinks that there are things he should be keeping to himself, that might be dangerous to say out loud. And once again when facing this man, Hal knows that he won’t. This time, though, he has almost explicit permission to knock himself out.

“Some part of you thought I was pretty charming when I was talking about stealing money from people at gas stations,” he says.

Jake flushes from his neck upwards, all the way to his hairline, giving the tan brown of his skin a dark red undertone. It's good to know, Hal thinks, that Jake remembers that moment as lively as he does. “Well,” Jake says and shifts on his feet. “Yes. I mean-- I  _ didn't  _ mean… What I am talking about, Hal, is that when you told me to see my kids it was the first time in a while that someone told me what to do and it wasn't… You know.”

He shrugs, still looking like a lost tourist in his own life, so Hal finishes the sentence for him. “For my own benefit,” he says. Jake nods and Hal asks, “Have you? Seen your kids since, I mean.”

“Uhh,” Jake says. Conveniently for him, in that very same second, the window behind him shatters.

Several things happen in perfect synchronization. Jake and Hal both flinch, and then duck in the same movement. Like before, Hal quickly decides that behind his bed is the best position of shelter from whatever is going on at the window, and Jake seems to have the same idea. They both crouch, Jake with a gun in each hand, Hal with both of his wrapped around the sword handle, and stare at each other. Then, in unison, both of them say, “What the fuck?”

“Who is that?” Hal hisses.

“I don’t know! Why would I know?” Jake hisses back.

“You’re the assassin here! What, did you bring friends along?”

Jake opens his mouth, but whatever he says gets drowned out by machine gun fire. Hal’s whole body tenses, turning him into a tight little ball behind his bed, and he stares at the wall opposite the window, currently getting riddled with bullet holes. The lightbulb from his desk lamp bursts, and papers fly through the air, post-it notes swirling around like snowflakes. His computer screen takes three shots and fizzles out, and Hal gasps.

“They probably don’t have a clear line of sight,” Jake says behind him, once the fire dies down again. “If they’re just shooting into the room blindly. They could be on their way up here though.”

“My screen,” Hal whispers, and winces when his gaze travels a little higher up the wall. “My  _ Shrek poster.” _

“Christ, Hal, focus,” Jake says. He pushes against Hal’s shoulder with one hand, which does make Hal snap out of it and stare at him again, but Jake looks about as confused as Hal feels. “I don’t know who else wants to kill you. It’s possible that they’re just my replacement since I botched the job.”

“Nobody wants to kill  _ me!” _ Hal says. The idea that someone is just standing in the backyard with a machine gun firing blindly through his window makes his head spin first, then he pauses abruptly. “Fuck,” he adds, staring at Jake like he just gave him the answer. “They’re here for Dirk, but Dirk left earlier. The stupid motherfucker has been taking my jacket lately so they must have thought he was me. And this window was the only lit one in the house.”

“Having a twin sounds very stressful,” Jake says. Something metallic clinks against the house from outside, and he throws Hal’s sword an irritated glance. “They’re about to come up here. Is, um. Is this your weapon of choice?”

Hal rolls his eyes. “You’ve seen me with a knife. You can imagine what I can do with a sword.”

“Yes, well, if you throw that at them, it’s gone,” Jake says. He takes one of his guns at the barrel, and holds it out to Hal, gesturing with the hand holding his other one. “Safety -- trigger -- that’s all you need for now. Squeeze hard, and by god, don’t bend your elbows. There’s sixteen rounds in there, so count.”

Already holding the gun, Hal wants to say something scathing back at him, but he can’t think of anything when all he hears is the unmistakable sound of someone climbing up the wall of his house. He and Dirk are on the second floor, so it’s not an impossible climb -- Jake must have managed, somehow. Like hell is he going to shoot at them, Hal thinks, and like hell is he going to let them climb into his sanctuary after blowing holes into his Shrek poster.

“If you wanna feel useful, cover me,” he tells the actual, successful hitman currently crouching in his room, then he emerges from behind his bed and charges. The way from the bed to the window is a straight one, with only his desk chair in between, and Hal knows exactly where it is and when to dodge it. He’s not about to get shot in his own damn home, he thinks, watching a head in a shitty black ski mask pop up in the shattered, floor-length window. Hal drops in the middle of his run, feet first, like he used to do in little league baseball.

Gun in one hand, sword in the other, Hal hits an intruder square in the face with his foot. He feels a nose bone crumble underneath his heel, hears an undignified yelp, then the guy just up and disappears from his vision again. Less than a second later, there is a dull thud from the ground below.

Hal wastes no time and gets back up on his feet, trying to make out what’s happening in the darkness outside. There’s a figure lying in the grass, definitely, but he’s not sure if they’re moving or not. Hal raises his sword arm, and then chucks his sword down towards the lawn, perfectly vertical. With a satisfying  _ shoonk, _ it lands right inside the attacker.

Maybe he’s imagining things, but Hal still thinks he saw something wiggle there. With one more hand available now, he grabs the gun with both of them, and aims it downwards. Behind him, he can hear Jake’s boots scrunch over the shards of glass all over his floor, and only then does he realize that that must be why his legs feel a little like they’re burning -- he slid right over the remains of his window on his way here.

It’s fine. The adrenaline keeps him going.

Blood is pumping between his ears when Jake’s big figure shows up next to him, silent for a good few seconds. “Huh,” he says then. Hal doesn’t move, still pointing the gun downwards, waiting. After another beat, Jake asks, “What’s your dominant eye?”

“What?” Hal blinks. He only throws him a quick glance before looking back down, his entire right side tingling from Jake’s presence. “Right,” he says.

“Okay,” Jake says. When he reaches over and gently pries Hal’s right hand away from the gun, Hal doesn’t flinch. “You want your trigger finger to be on your left, then. That means your right should be over here, stabilizing.” He places Hal’s right over the grip of the gun, as opposed to underneath it, like he saw in movies. His hand feels soft and warm on Hal’s, almost like it’s not teaching him how to point a gun at someone already lying on the ground. “Shooting a gun is really all about not getting knocked back by the recoil.”

It’s rare, but Hal doesn’t know what to say. He nods, listening to the blood rush through him, staring at the human person outside. Jake could have ended like this, he thinks. Then again, he thinks a moment later, Jake managed to climb in here without alerting Hal, until he was already there. Maybe it was always meant to end like this.

“That was, um.” Next to him, Jake clears his throat. “That was really good, Hal. Really, uh… pretty impressive. Seems like I forgot how fast you could be.”

Slowly, Hal feels his shoulders relax. His left index hurts with how tightly it’s curled around the trigger, and how carefully he keeps himself from pulling it. He thinks there might be a glass shard lodged in his thigh, and there might be blood running down his calf. He flexes his back, and dares to look away, to look up at Jake instead. “Thanks.”

Jake opens his mouth and closes it. He says, “You look really nice with my gun,” then blanches. Where he was flushing before, the color drains from him now, making him look ashen just above his beard. The compliment actually helped Hal loosen up a bit more, so this is weird to see, and he’s about to say something nonchalant to helpfully defuse whatever is going on, but Jake is faster than him. His words, too, come out a little bit too quick when he says, “Hey, I’ll hop on down and check if that fella is really dead, okay?”

“Uh, sure,” Hal says. Once again, he wonders how Jake even got up here in the first place, while he watches him slip down to grab the grappling hook rope the other guy came up here with, and work himself towards the ground. He lands with the confident stance of a man who has done this plenty of times.

For a few seconds, nothing happens. With his eyes a little more adjusted to the darkness by now, Hal can see Jake bend down and inspect the person he impaled with his sword, even the way he prods them with his foot. Then Jake raises his gun and shoots them in the head. Hal snorts. Better safe than sorry, he supposes. “Thanks,” he calls down. Jake looks up at him briefly, nods, and then turns away and walks.

Confused, Hal looks along the direction he’s going in, and recognizes Jake’s car parked just outside the backyard. “Hey,” Hal half-yells after him, from up here in his window. “Hey, where you going?”

Jake starts walking faster.

Mother fucker.

It takes Hal a few frantic seconds to figure out how to put the safety back on, then he shoves Jake’s gun down the back of his pants like people do in movies (the weight and cold right above his ass is disconcerting at best, and he decides that he hates it), and lowers himself out the window. He has climbed  _ up _ ropes before, but rarely down, and the sudden rush he’s in doesn’t make it much less intimidating. When he reaches the ground, his foot lands on the meaty thigh of a dead person lying in his yard, and Hal makes an unhappy noise he’s glad nobody could have heard.

Jake has already made it to his car.

Ignoring the continuous burn in his legs, Hal crosses his own backyard in few wide steps, and then hops right over the fence. “Jake!” he calls again, but it’s barely audible when the engine turns on in the very same moment. “Jake! Don’t you  _ fucking _ bail on me again!”

The headlights turn on. Hal grabs the gun from the back of his pants, thumbs the safety off, and stabilizes with his right. The first shot misses the car entirely, the second hits the trunk. Fourteen rounds left, Hal thinks, and hits the left back tire. Jake’s car swerves, and skids to a halt again, barely ten feet from where it left off.

While Hal stomps over the street towards it, the car stays perfectly, almost eerily still. Only when he’s almost there already does the driver’s side door open and Jake gets out again, shoulders hunched. He doesn’t even look at Hal, shuffling right over to the busted tire. With his back turned to Hal, Hal can  _ see _ him sigh.

“Well,” he says, one hand on his car, bent down, still not looking at him. Hal has never pistol-whipped anyone before, but he’s getting pretty damn close. “Teach a man to shoot, eh?”

Hal reaches out with his free hand and grabs Jake by the shoulder. It’s big and solid under his palm, and yet when he whirls Jake around and presses him backwards against the side of his car, he just moves with him. Pliable. Waiting to be told what to do. Hal says, “What the fuck, man?”

“Haha,” Jake says. He doesn’t actually laugh, he just says  _ haha _ out loud. He, too, presses himself flat against the car now, as far away as possible from Hal, who is still pushing his hand against his shoulder and staring up at him. “How do you mean, Hal?”

“You came all the way here,” Hal starts, gesturing with the gun. Jake’s eyes follow it nervously.

“Please put the safety back on, will you?”

Hal stops talking mid-word, squints at him, then releases his breath in a furious exhale. He lets go of Jake’s shoulder, and looks down to carefully handle the gun. It doesn’t feel as warm as he expected it to, after firing thrice. “Like this?”

“Yes, thank you. Well done,” Jake says.

“Okay,” Hal says. He puts the gun into the back of his pants again, and then goes right back to pushing Jake against his car, this time with both hands on his shoulders. “Where the fuck was I?”

“I don’t rememb--” Jake starts saying, but Hal does.

“You came  _ all the way here,” _ he continues, “to climb in  _ through my window, _ and tell me that you shouldn’t have let me go, and then you-- You just leave? What the  _ fuck _ is going  _ on? _ Do you want to be here or not, you complete disaster of a person?”

“I do!” Jake says immediately, loudly, hands flying up to hover between them. It looks apologetic at first, then Hal feels his shoulders tense underneath his palms. “I-- You’re-- You’re very close.”

“Sorry,” Hal says and takes a half step back. It forces him to take his hands off of him too, so he crosses his arms instead. When Jake doesn’t say anything, his thoughts return to pistol-whipping briefly, but then instead of talking, Jake looks down, and Hal follows his gaze.

There, between them, in the dark of the night and the dark of Jake’s black clothes, is a bulge in his pants.

Oh.

“Oh,” Hal says.

Immediately, both of Jake’s hands shoot down to cover himself, like he’s a cartoon figure that just got pantsed. When Hal looks back up at his face, it is once again flushed dark, and he seems to be pleading with him. “See?” Jake says, very urgently. Hal has no idea what he means. “I wanted to come see you again because you were-- uh, you were nice-- well, you weren’t very nice to me, but you were interesting to be around, so that’s why I wanted-- But I can’t! You are very attractive and so I can’t be doing this!”

Hal automatically squares his shoulders a little, because he is pushing a big man who has killed people against a car and apparently that’s hot. It’s just good to know, is all. He says, “Dude, what are you talking about?”

With his hands preoccupied, Jake gestures with his shoulders instead, an exasperated wiggle against his car door. “Well you clearly aren’t attracted to me! So what am I supposed to do?”

_ “What?” _ Hal says, his voice shaking with displaced laughter he does his best to suppress. “What… What gave you that idea?”

“There have been no advances!” Jake says loudly, but deflates a little when he catches up to Hal’s tone. “I mean… Right? There haven’t… You haven’t said anything, and, well, also, I did try to kill you.”

Hal shrugs. “It’s your job,” he says, which sounds perfectly reasonable to him in this very moment, and has been sounding perfectly reasonable for a few weeks now. “That doesn’t mean it’s not hot when you pin me to the floor, man.”

“But,” Jake starts saying, but Hal shakes his head.

“You only think there have been no advances,” he says, “because I haven’t straight up told you to bend me over the hood of this car.” Jake flinches like he just got kicked in the shin, and tightens the way his hands are still covering his crotch. Hal continues, “And I’m not going to. Look, who do you take me for? The entire time I spent on this backseat there behind you, you were telling me about how bad you are at saying no to people, even if you want to. I’m not gonna proposition a guy who I know is gonna say yes no matter what he actually wants. That’s just poor form. Who am I, Robin Thicke?”

“Who’s Robin Thicke?” Jake says.

“It’s not important, but maybe you’d know if you occasionally listened to the radio instead of talking to gagged people in your car.”

When Jake barks a nervous laugh, his hands come up to his mouth instead, then drop to his sides. Then he reaches up again to rub his neck; an anxious perpetuum mobile. Hal decides to give him some time, and after a few seconds, Jake takes a breath and says, “Well, then.” He manages to look Hal in the face, which Hal thinks is impressively brave. “I think the hood is a little too public for my tastes. But would you care to make out inside my ruined car some, perhaps?”

Hal snorts against the shiver that runs down his spine, trying briefly to still act cool through the way he can feel his neck heat up. “Hell yeah,” he says.

It's like some switch is flipped in Jake. Where he was all flappy hands and hunched shoulders before, he now smoothly opens the car door behind him, grabs Hal by the hips, and maneuvers him back first into the car. Hal makes sure to scoot up, make as much room as he can, and Jake loses no time getting on top of him, one foot in the leg room, one knee between Hal's, hands still on him, his whole body so very close. “Sure didn't think I'd see you back here again,” Jake says.

Hal considers the pros and cons of saying something witty back, for about half a second. Then he wraps a hand around the back of Jake's neck and brings their mouths together.

Jake kisses like someone who has been starving. It’s not rough -- his lips are soft and the way his beard tickles Hal’s upper lip is gentle enough to not make him laugh. The hands on his hips are light, careful even, like hurting him is, now, the last thing he’d want to do. But the kiss turns open-mouthed almost immediately, and when Jake’s lips slide over Hal’s with the urgency of a drowning man at sea it sends a flash of heat down the entirety of his body.

There’s an awkward touch to this that is weirdly endearing, even if physically painful. The backseat barely has enough room for two people, let alone when one of them is of Jake’s size. Hal vividly remembers how littered and dirty the legroom of the passenger seat was in here. Some spots in both of Hal’s thighs are still prickling and burning, and he’s pretty sure there are at least two shards still stuck in his skin. When he wraps his arms around Jake’s middle to run his fingers up his back, he can feel one of Jake’s guns dig into the crook of his elbow from its shoulder holster. Jake’s other gun, of course, is still in the back of Hal’s pants, digging into his spine and ass.

It’s hasty, it’s messy, unideal, there is a dead person in the backyard and the lights of Hal’s room are still on, not to mention the entirely broken window and the rope leading down from it. It’s fantastic. It’s one of the best kisses he’s ever had.

Jake soon licks into his mouth, and from there, things don't take long to get heated. His hands are warm on Hal's already burning skin when they slip underneath his shirt and run up his stomach, thumbs running over the quiver of Hal's abs. The adrenaline in his veins still very much carries the memory of a total of two people breaking into his house with varying success tonight, and while Jake's teeth pulling on his lips make his head swim in blissful fog, the rest of his body feels everything twice as intensely, fight or flight reflexes wrestling with the tight pull steadily coiling in his guts.

As Hal runs his nails down Jake’s back, making the shirt fabric ripple underneath them, Jake drags his hands from the front of his rib cage towards his sides. He keeps pushing until he can wedge them between Hal and the backseat, his fingertips pressing hot into tight muscle around Hal’s spine.

It’s then that the rest of Jake also moves. With his eyes still closed and the kiss very much still going, Hal has no idea how he even does it in the confined space of the car, but he can feel Jake’s hips rolling down against his. Just when he banks on the kiss to muffle the noise that pulls out of him, Jake moves his lips away to brush over his jaw, and his moan hits the air unbridled.

Head spinning, Hal thinks that this might perhaps be something they should be talking about, but coming up with words is as hard as the bulge building in his pants. Luckily, Jake’s hands go deeper still, and when they’re almost on his ass, he detaches himself from Hal just enough to look at him.

“Oh,” he says, realization dawning on his face, pulling his lips into a grin. “Hey, is that a gun in your pants, or are you just happy to see me?”

“Gun,” Hal says diligently. Jake looks positively jazzed about the expertly executed joke, then maneuvers the gun out of the waistband, and back into his shoulder holster.

“I’ll be taking that, if you don’t mind,” he says. “You get up to nothing but trouble with it.”

“Pretty sure that’s what guns are for,” Hal says. Jake is already opening his mouth to object, but when Hal shifts, their hips press together again, and it seems to get stuck in his throat. Hal says, “Hey, uh, you were talking about makeouts. Is this still okay?”

People have different definitions of what making out means, he thinks, and Jake is already looking kind of confused by the question. He looks down at where their hips are meeting, pants rubbing against pants, and Hal can hear him swallow.

“Oh,” he says again. He keeps looking down, like there’s anything new to see here, but Hal doesn’t mind. Eye contact is hard. When he reaches up to run a hand through Jake’s thick hair, he can see his eyes flutter closed. “I… Yes. I would actually-- Um. I would love a hand on me. If that’s alright with you.”

It’s hard not to laugh. Laughing at someone when they express a sexual wish is pretty poor form, but Hal loves laughing at people, so it’s tough to fight. He manages, though. After a sly tug on his hair, he drags his hand down instead, down the broad expanse of Jake’s chest and towards his pants. “Sure,” he says, and watches a shiver wash over Jake. “You can have your backseat handy. Stay classy, Jake.”

“I would also like to,” Jake starts saying, then clears his throat. “May I give you one too?”

This time, Hal does laugh, but at least it only comes out as a breathy snort, and Jake soldiers through it. “You’re very polite for someone who once held a gun to my head to make me shut up.”

“I’m about to do it again,” Jake says, and Hal’s brows shoot up.

“Nasty,” he says, already making quick work of Jake’s fly. “What if I’m into it?”

Jake, too, huffs a laugh, and half of his warm breath lands on the side of Hal’s neck when he leans down over him again. “I hope not,” he says, lips brushing over Hal’s pulse when he does. “Gun safety is very important to me.”

“Pretty sexy thing to say,” Hal quips, which might just be one step too far, because Jake hurries to shut him up by popping open his pants and pushing a hand down his underwear.

For a second, Hal’s mind whites out entirely. There sure has been a lot going on, and feeling a big and warm hand wrap around his erection after a night of break-ins, possibly killing someone, and learning how to shoot a gun, is almost too much to process. He recovers quickly, though, appealing to his ego.  _ He _ was supposed to be giving Jake a hand. He can’t be silenced that easily.

With both hands, Hal tugs down Jake’s pants and underwear just far enough, then goes for gold. When his fingers close around his cock, Jake shivers against him, breath stuttering right next to Hal’s ear, and he smiles to himself. It doesn’t last long, of course, because Jake remembers to move. As he drags one of his hands up, the other one goes down Hal's thigh-- and then stops.

Barely fighting back a whine, Hal tries to buck his hips into Jake, tries to tug on him enough to get him focused again, but instead both of Jake's hands leave him completely. “Fucker,” Hal gets out, already sounding more raw than he would like to. “What are you doing?”

“Is that,” Jake says, “a glass shard in your leg?”

Begrudgingly, Hal blinks his eyes open, to see Jake crouched over him, temples sweaty, pants bunched up around his ass, dick hard and curving upwards, and yet bent over one of Hal's legs, inspecting. Hal says, “No, I'm just happy to see you.”

Jake doesn't seem to appreciate the joke this time. He casts him a glance, then takes the shard between thumb and index. It's a small one, nothing actually threatening, but it still stings when he pulls it out. Hal grimaces.

“Was that in there the whole time?” Jake asks.

Barely swallowing down his sarcastic answer, Hal says, “Yeah. I think there's another one in my left.”

Jake sighs, like Hal should have told him this right from the start (maybe… maybe he should have), and shifts around on his knees to get to inspect Hal's other leg as well. Hal watches his naked cock instead of focusing on the way he can feel the glass leave his skin. It bobs against Jake's stomach when he flicks the shard away, and sits back on his haunches.

“Is,” Jake starts saying, instead of just getting back to business like a normal person. “Is this too weird?”

Oh.

With a steadying breath, Hal forces himself to shake off the horny. He would much rather be touching Jake’s dick right now, but if the man wants to say something, he should give him the space. “Is it?” he says, then clears his throat so he can stop sounding like someone with their pants open on the backseat of a car. “Is… Are you uncomfortable?”

“Me?” Jake says, and gives him an incredulous look. “No. But aren’t you? You’re very literally bleeding, and I did very literally break into your abode tonight, and… I just don’t know why you… This  _ should _ be weird to you.”

“It’s very weird,” Hal says. Jake’s shoulders fall and it takes a lot out of him to not roll his eyes at this guy. “Doesn’t mean I don’t still want you all over me.”

“Are you sure?” Jake says. He looks perfectly confused with his brows knitted together and his hands hovering in mid air, but all Hal can think about is the bliss that surged through his head when he touched him. How the mess in the garden and the blood on his thighs all completely vanished from his consciousness. He doesn’t care if it’s weird. The backseat he was once passed out on is starting to get cold with Jake removed from it.

“We’ve been over this,” Hal says, and pulls him back down by the back of his neck. “It’s fine. Get your dick back in my hands. It’s all gonna be alright.”

So Jake comes back down with a laugh, and it peters out into a breathless moan once Hal gets his hand on him. With every gun and every shard of shattered window pane out of the way, he does seem more focused. Hal widens his grip to take both of them in, and watches as the friction against both Hal’s hand and his cock makes Jake’s eyes flutter shut, watches his arms flex through his shirt when Jake shifts more of his weight on them, so he can start rolling his hips forward. That’s more like it. When Hal swipes his thumb over both tips to help the slide with some precum, there is no room for worry on Jake’s face anymore.

He looks blissed out instead, body taut, every part of him working for pleasure. His mouth is open just barely, gasps and groans growing louder with each thrust of his hips. He works himself up into a pace, so much so that Hal barely moves his hand anymore and just lets Jake fuck into it instead. It’s a steady rhythm of hot friction, and Hal barely even hears his own moans in between Jake’s voice and the constant clinking of his open belt.

Eventually, Jake’s elbows give out and he comes down again, pressing his face into the crook of his neck. Breath brushes hot past his pulse and Hal can’t help but squirm, the heels of his shoes scraping over the other end of the backseat. He’s been trying not to, but he can’t fight the way his hips buck into his own hand anymore, which only results in Jake swearing and picking up on both speed and intensity. 

Hal’s free arm wraps around Jake again, and once more he can feel one of his guns digging into his skin when he does, and it translates as terribly hot to him. Almost frantically, his hand pushes up Jake’s shirt, makes it bunch at his wrist somewhere mid-torso, just so he can rake his fingernails over the skin of his back. Jake moans loudly, then muffles his voice by biting at Hal’s shoulder. He can still feel the noise vibrate through his bones, and it’s the combination that sends him over the edge.

Climax hits him in waves, the first one making his body go rigid underneath Jake, and he only barely keeps his hand from clamping around them both. He can still feel Jake moving, still fucking into it and rubbing against him, and hears himself swear in between desperate moans. Relief washes over him next; his tense muscles relax, from his shoulders down his back all the way to his legs, in a series of pleased shudders. Above him, Jake follows suit then, the movement of his hips going erratic first, then stopping completely. They both spill over Hal’s hand and shirt, Hal with a hoarse groan, while Jake moans loud enough that he’s pretty sure the dead person in the backyard might have heard him.

He collapses on Hal afterwards, like an old folding chair, only heavier. He smells like sex and sweat and what Hal thinks might be gunpowder, and he is almost definitely crushing his ribs and the hand Hal has trapped between them, but he doesn’t complain. Jake’s breath brushes past his ear, and on every other exhale, he makes a satisfied little humming noise, and it’s cute. Hal thinks about the dramatic dog sighs he does again, and starts to believe that this might be a theme with the guy.

With time, Hal can feel his own heartbeat in every little cut in his legs, and his trapped hand is falling asleep, which is fine with him because it feels gross and sticky between their shirts. The car lies silent and cool, a very large reminder of whose dick exactly he just had in his hand, but somehow Hal can’t muster up the morals to feel wrong about it. This was hot as fuck, and both of Jake’s guns are still in their holsters, safety on and hands off. He doesn’t care about much else right now.

Finally, with a grunt as if he was thirty years older (It is in this moment that Hal realizes he has no idea how old this guy is. Old enough to have children, but then again, so is Hal. He could be anywhere between mid twenties and early fifties, and Hal is way too relaxed to worry about it now), Jake pushes himself up again. He sits on one of his feet, the other one in the legroom to stabilize him, and looks down at Hal with an apologetic frown.

“We got your shirt all soiled,” he says.

“Yeah,” Hal says and looks down at himself. His shirt is rucked up a little, which means that there’s cum stains both on the fabric and on his stomach, drying fast and cool in the night air, now that Jake isn’t covering him anymore. “I forgot that was gonna happen.”

“Sorry.”

“It’s fine. I can just climb back inside through my busted ass window and find a new shirt.”

Jake makes a noise that’s somewhere between a surprised wheeze and an actual laugh. When Hal looks up, he’s nodding, and rubbing his fingers over a small stain on his own shirt. “Would you care to help me change my tire afterwards?” he asks, and looks at Hal. It’s not super subtle, as far as invitations go, Hal thinks, but it’s not bad. He’s welcome to come back out after changing clothes. Jake is still going to be here. “You’re the one who put a hole in it in the first place, so that would be the polite thing to do.”

“And I’ve been striking you as a polite person?” Hal says, but ends up softening his grin into something nicer. “Sure. You got a spare here?”

“Of course!” Jake says. “Do I look like some sort of buffoon to you?” When Hal doesn’t say anything, Jake grins right back at him. “I don’t want to hear the answer to that.”

“You don’t want to hear the answer to that,” Hal says. He gets up and shakes his hand awake, then tucks himself back into his pants, because it is starting to get a little cold, and it gives him something else to look at when he asks, “Where you going after this?”

Jake says, “Um,” and Hal hears the soft scraping of his nails scratching his beard. “I didn’t really plan that far. Normally, at this point, I am already out the door, you know, but this is my car.” He clears his throat, and huffs another one of those embarrassed laughs. “I live about an hour from here. So, there, probably.”

“Okay,” Hal says. He’s all dressed, now, so he has nowhere to look but at Jake. He is in between Hal and the still open door, but if Hal wanted to leave, he could just use the one on this side. He doesn’t move, though, just looks at Jake a little longer, waiting for him to ask. Of course, Jake doesn’t. Hal figures the amount of communicating he has done on his own tonight might have maxed out his monthly allowance. So it’s Hal who asks, “Can I come?”

Jake’s face lights up. “Yes,” he says, as if the answer could be that simple. As if he didn’t literally leave Hal in a ditch and drive away the last time he was asking questions like this. Hal snorts, rubs his eyes with his clean hand, then tries to shake off the thought. Maybe things are simple to Jake. Maybe he can learn from him, a little.

He makes sure to unnecessarily climb over Jake’s lap on his way out of the car, and when he turns to look at him again, Jake is still sitting in the backseat with that dopey smile on his face. He barely seems like the same person who tried to kill him, only a few weeks ago.

“Meet you back here in five minutes,” Hal says.

Jake says, “Okay.”

This time, Hal uses the actual gate to get into his backyard. The person who tried to climb into his room is still lying in the grass, impaled with his sword and shot in the head. It’s a chilling reminder, very suddenly, that the guy back there in the car  _ is _ the same person who tried to kill him only a few weeks ago. As Hal makes it to his room and takes in the carnage, he wonders if all of this hasn’t been some sort of long con. It could all have been planned, to make Hal feel safe and then off him, get rid of him as a witness, maybe of Dirk too in some way.

After washing his hands, Hal changes out of his cum stained shirt and his blood stained jeans, and texts his brother to ask if he’s okay. Dirk replies with a,  _ Yes. What do you want? _ which is on point enough for Hal to assume that his phone wasn’t hijacked by a killer.

Hal texts back,  _ My window is busted, I’ll fix it tomorrow. Out for tonight. Also there’s a dead guy in the backyard, _ then pockets his phone, not keen on seeing what Dirk thinks about that. He prides himself on being hard to bullshit, and Jake does not seem like someone who could even begin to plan a long con, so he’s going to test his luck. He’s out for tonight.

On the way back to Jake’s car, he still pulls his sword free from the cadaver with a gross, wet squelch. Look, you can never be too sure.

Jake is leaning against the back of his car in all his glory, long legs crossed at the ankles, hands in his pockets, guns still in both holsters. When he sees the sword, he laughs, and nods sympathetically. “Would hate to be the guy who tries to kill you, Hal,” he says.

“Oh, I know,” Hal says. He straps the sword to his back, and takes a look at the tire Jake has gotten out of his trunk in the meantime. No wonder he doesn't transport people back there. “No coming back for seconds for you.”

“I might still come back for those,” Jake says. When Hal looks up, he’s grinning and pointing towards the dried fleck of cum on the hem of his shirt. “Seconds of a different kind.”

To ignore the warmth going down his spine at that, Hal snorts at him. “Smooth line, Romeo,” he says, focusing hard on the tire now. “Come on, I need your car jack.”

  
  


Jake’s place looks like the bachelor pad of someone who is also a grandfather, and Hal makes sure to tell him so the second he steps inside. They were comparing movie opinions on the drive there, so clearly they are both tension-laden now, and initiate Round Two right up against the wall of Jake’s cluttered living room. Before Jake calls him an Uber to get home in the morning, Hal makes sure they exchange numbers.

Dirk has gotten rid of the body in his absence, and will proceed to give Hal the stinkeye for the entire next month. Hal gets his window fixed, and buys a new computer monitor.

Three days later, Jake comes back for seconds, and gifts him a new, bullet hole-free Shrek poster.

Life stops being boring again. Occasionally, now, Hal helps Jake deal with victims and customers alike, doxxing a wide variety of Craigslist users. Sometimes, when Jake travels for work, Hal will skip class and come with him, lounging about in hotel rooms while waiting for him to come back in all heated and covered in blood. And he always does.

Jake keeps coming back.


End file.
